Saturday, 31 August 2013

SEO for Content

Content is King. Therefore, it goes without saying that is the most important part of your website/Blog. Your website/Blog will features the content that you want the visitors to read or find, obviously that’s what your intention was in the first place. The content that you add to your site can be in the form of text, images, videos and or even audio files. Therefore, whether it is a website, a social networking site or a Blog, whatever appears visually on your pages is the content.

It could be a fixed content, like in case of a corporate website, or user generated content. It could also be dynamic content, like in case of an online store. Anyhow, irrespective of the type of page, the content appearing on a page needs to be optimized because the search engine companies understand that the visual content is the one that is important and in order to present results that are relevant to your visitors the content needs to be analysed and evaluated for quality and relevance and page ranking needs to be done according. In this chapter, we will highlight the points that need to be addressed in order to optimize the content of your website /Blog for search engines.

In the earlier chapter, it was mentioned that the content should be written for the visitors and not for the search engines. It is important to bring this point to your notice and to remind you of it once again. There is no point getting a visitors to your website and he/she not liking the content or the usability of your website. After all, it is the content of the page that is going to engage your visitors and hence it is imperative that the content is developed in a manner so as to engage the visitors and convert him into a follower. This will ensure repeated visits and maybe sales in case of a commercial website. In case of a Blog or forum the repeated visits ensure readership and participation in the activities of the respective site.

Therefore, the first and most important rule is to write for people and not machines. Write as you would for any other media like a magazine or a newspaper. The writing rules remain the same. Good grammer, short crisp sentences and paragraphs, clarity of thought, flow of the content and relevance to the topic make an interesting read. Follow these guidelines and you are not likely to go wrong. Optimizing the content means tweaking and arranging your content in a manner so as to help the spiders come to the right conclusion, that is your content is relevant, is of a high quality and is appreciated by the readers. This should not be a very difficult thing to accomplish since it is humans who have made the search engines and the way they operate is very similar to how humans do. The only difference is that the process has been automated and works on a mathematical model. Due to this reason the process has been generalized and hence the requirement of optimization.